Taxing Our Patience

jchri66: Your comparing public safety and education with healthcare is an apples and oranges argument. Police, fire, and education are, for the most part, state and local community controlled and funded public services. Though they do receive some federal money in the form of grants, they are not run by the federal government. The only true way to make our health care worse in the US would be to hand it over to the government to run. I need only point to Medicare and its well-documented fraud, waste, abuse, and marginal care; and the military healthcare system, best typified by the recently publicized incidents of neglect at Walter Reed. Both these systems do great things, but the glaring failures overshadow them.

We need tort reform and liability limits; we should remove the non-profit status of hospital systems that maintain that status by spending their profits rather than reducing their fees.

On the larger issue of the tax cuts and spending: Properly sized, targeted, and timed tax cuts stimulate the economy. They must, however, be coupled with fiscal restraint, which has been sorely lacking, for a variety of reasons.

Be careful throwing around the term 'hypocrite'. That knife cuts both ways, on a whole host of issues.

"Tax-and-spend" is a hackneyed expression. Many of the oprograms so called tax-and-spend Democrats advocate mean lower in the future. Bush has substituted tax-and-spend with borrow-and-squander with the biggest tax cuts going to the very people who rip off the government and the publica the most. We're not lowering taxes, we're merely passing higher taxes on to the next generation. Tax-and-spend liberals in the long run are the only true conservatives.

I'm so sick of all the rich bashing. I've lived on $30k a year and it sucks, so I worked my a** off and now I'm in the 1%. I assure you the government didn't do anything to help me succeed in business, rather they complicated the process with all the regulatory controls. I provide good-paying jobs to hundreds of families in my community and I pay well into six figures in taxes every year. Just because I have money doesn't mean I should be forced to pay more than the next guy. Last time I checked, all that extra tax I paid didn't get me any more benefits or services than the guy making $30k, so how is that fair. Free markets and Capitalism will always create wealth for a minority of people. The whole tax system is a mess. It shouldn't take me thousands of dollars in legal and accounting fees to complete my tax return. If everyone paid 15-20% tax on all income over a certain minimum poverty threshold, we could collect just as much tax, reduce the cost of collecting it and file our returns on a single page online. Washington is broke and taking more money from the rich to give to the poor is not going to fix anything.

The fact is, when you cut taxes you increase revenues. This has been proven over and over again and again. If you follow this logically, it only makes sense that if we cut the tax rate to 0% the government would receive an infinite amount of tax revenue. If you take this even further and introduce a negative tax rate, of say -20%, where the government gives everybody money and nobody has to pay in, we will have a super duper infinite amount of tax revenue from which we can pay of all our existing debt.

This is called the Laugher curve. If you don't understand it, you are obviously too dumb to understand the President's brilliance.

Same bullshit as usual. Bush is making the hole in the economy as wide as he can before he passes on his Presidential title to another, so he can sit back and ejoy his mansion while the new president struggles with the economy.

George W Bush is the man. Anyone ever hear of the premise that the President represents the people?

Bush isn't any more of a liar and cheater than 98% of Americans. I'm tired of listening to all the holier than thou crap from columnists, media, and opinionated readers. If you can do a better job in office, Daniel Gross, let's see you go do it.

It seems to me we could have an entire series of publications entitled "How Bush Is Misleading America on ______________." There are at least a hundred different topics that could fill in the blank, from the Iraq war to the economy.

The real problem is that Republicans cling to "trickle down economics" and "deficits don't matter" - throwbacks from the Reagan era.

Read a report by Paul Krugman? Are you serious? If the president came out with a free cure for cancer and AIDS tomorrow, you would find fault with it. It's no wonder I have a hard time reading all the way through a copy of Newsweek without getting mad and throwing it in the trash.

Sigh...people...There is a huge deficit for many reasons, but most importantly because President Clinton and many others decided that we Americans were entitled to a peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. The Armed Forces were slashed in the fantasy that the world was no longer a dangerous place. Alas, after Al-Qaeda began this Holy War (and we are knee deep in one...witness PBS's Frontline last night), Billions were needed in order to make the military fit for service. I'm no great GW fan, but I do believe he came in to office at an unfortunate time.

XENA peel(phobe): You are a Constitutional moron! The Constitution of the United States is a living, breathing document, not a static manifesto. It was written to be adaptable to the will of the people, including provisions for its own revision, through the amendment process. This includes the Sixteenth Amendment, which reads, "The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration." You are not a 'no-tax' Constitutionalist; you are an anarchist. And an incredible dolt, to boot.

if the tax cuts that were enacted are so bad, then why are income tax receipts higher now than at any time in history? It's a farily proven economic phenomenon that when you lower the marginal tax rate, you increase tax revenue. Don't make the mistake of linking tax cuts with increased spending. They are two different things. No argument about how poorly the current administration has handled runaway federal spending, but the deficit doesn't exist because the tax cuts that were put into place are not generating any revenue.

The problem with most of the discussion of tax increases is that where the taxes would be spent is never discussed by the tax cut crowd, or what spending would have to be cut. If Bush's tax cuts are made permanent it would probably lead to all or most of the following: major cuts in social security and Medicare for all seniors. The repair of our roads and bridges will not happen resulting in more deaths as bridges collapse and roads deteriorate. The quality or our education system will continue to deteriorate resulting in a decreased ability to innovate and compete in the world economy and result in the stagnating or outright reduction in our standard of living in the future. Finally it will lead to a continued increase in the amount of people without health care which will put more pressure on our health care system creating even longer waits at our hospitals and a reduced capacity to respond to major disasters or a bird flu pandemic.